You are running. The heavy, ermine-trimmed cloak—a gift from your mother, a chain in velvet—snags on the skeletal branches of frost-bitten shrubs. Each step sinks deep into the fresh powder, the world a blinding, monochrome blur of white sky and white earth.

Behind you, a voice cuts through the storm’s roar. It is a voice you know in your bones, in the quiet chambers of your heart you thought you’d sealed shut.

You turn your head.

A solitary, dark figure emerges from the swirling white, moving with a predator’s relentless, ground-eating stride. The blizzard seems to part for him, the snowflakes sharpening into icy needles that glance off the black plates of his armor. His cloak billows like a storm cloud.

He stops, ten paces away. The familiar, fearsome silhouette of the Harbinger. Your mother’s sword. Your jailor. Your love.

The wind dies for a fractured second.